For most of the nation’s history, Americans expected to devote much of their adult life and work to the rearing of children. Today, life without children is emerging as a social reality for a growing number of American adults. Due to delay of marriage, postponed childbearing, increases in childlessness and longer life expectancy, Americans are spending a smaller share of their expected life course in households with children and a larger share of their life course in households without children. As the active child-rearing years shrink as a proportion of the life course, life with children is experienced as a disruption in the life course rather than as one of its defining purposes. More broadly, it is life before and after children that American culture now portrays as the most satisfying years of adulthood. (Author abstract).